ARTSBEAT; A Great Play Can Be Read, Too

By ERIC GRODE

Published: April 19, 2012

CORRECTION APPENDED

You can't see Quiara Alegr?Hudes's ''Water by the Spoonful'' right now, even though it just won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The play, the second part of a trilogy, ran for less than a month in its world premiere at Hartford Stage in late 2011. The other two finalists, Jon Robin Baitz's ''Other Desert Cities'' and Stephen Karam's ''Sons of the Prophet,'' were far better known, having enjoyed prominent and well-received New York productions; ''Other Desert Cities'' is playing on Broadway and is a likely contender for the Tony Award for best play, to be announced in June.

This is not the first time the Pulitzer has gone to a play on the strength of the script as opposed to a production. (None of the five jurors saw ''Water'' in Hartford.) That's completely permissible according to the prize rules, but it tends to ruffle feathers; the last time this happened -- when Nilo Cruz's ''Anna in the Tropics'' won sight unseen in 2003 -- the theater critic John Lahr of The New Yorker sniffed that it was ''as absurd as giving a restaurant four stars on the basis of its menu.''

But why? Couldn't an argument be made that judging the merits of a play is more accurate, not less, when the middlemen and -women are cut out?

I didn't see the Hartford production, either, but for the record, Ms. Hudes has written a strong, tender, somewhat innovative character study of a Puerto Rican family ravaged by war and drugs. One character, Elliot (also featured in the trilogy's opener, ''Elliot, a Soldier's Fugue,'' itself a Pulitzer finalist in 2007), picked up a leg injury and a prescription drug habit while serving in Iraq. His birth mother, Odessa, spends her days moderating an online chat room for recovering crack addicts as a kind of penance for the damage she did to her family when she was a user.

The innovation comes in those chat room sessions: Ms. Hudes stresses in her stage directions that they should be delivered while the characters mill about living their lives, not sitting and miming typing with their fluttering fingers. As a result, reading these scenes approximates the act of reading posts in a chat room far more than watching actors recite them ever could. That's just what all five Pulitzer jury members did - and how they envisioned these moments undoubtedly differed from how they were depicted in Davis McCallum's Hartford production, which Frank Rizzo of The Hartford Courant called ''beautifully staged'' and ''one of the best new plays I've seen in years.''

Anyone who has spent time reading plays has his own favorite stage directions, from Shakespeare's ''Exit, pursued by a bear'' to Eugene O'Neill's laborious line-by-line descriptions to the gauntlet-dropping stagecraft challenges of Sarah Kane and Antonin Artaud. In fact, I would argue that the further a theater piece moves away from kitchen-sink naturalism, the more vividly each reader contributes his or her own mind's-eye production. And on one level, won't those images trump whatever you'd actually pay someone else to create for you?

The Goodman Theater in Chicago will have the premiere of the final part of Ms. Hudes's trilogy in April 2013, and it's likely that the Pulitzer attention will result in a major new production of ''Water by the Spoonful'' before much longer. The Hartford version that so riveted Mr. Rizzo, along with the five subsequent versions of the play that the Pulitzer jury members created when they read it, have set the bar very high.

Have you ever seen a production after reading the script (or vice versa) and been surprised at how different the two experiences were?

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Because of an editing error, a report in the ArtsBeat column on Thursday about the play ''Water by the Spoonful'' by Quiara Alegría Hudes, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama on Monday, misspelled the surname of the writer of ''Sons of the Prophet,'' one of the two other finalists for the prize. He is Stephen Karam, not Karan.